Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor born Joseph Niépce March 7th 1765 – July 5th 1833.
He in known to have been the creator of the worlds oldest known camera photograph still in existence that was created in 1826 or 1827.
The photograph was taken from a window in his house on a pewter sheet coated with bitumen. It was said that the exposure to the street below his window would have taken 8 to 9 hours. However, a researcher later found that the exposure would have likely taken several days to achieve after reviewing Niépce’s notes and materials historically accurate for the time and recreated the process as an experiment.
In 1829 Niépce partnered with Louis Daguerre who was also trying to invent a means of creating a permanent images from a camera. Through their work the Physautotype photographic process was created as an improvement to Niépce’s earlier processes. The partnership between the two lasted unto Niépce’s death and Louis Daguerre then went on to continue making innovations to the photographic process.
Although other inventors such as Thomas Wedgwood and Henry Fox Talbot around the same time as Niépce were also creating means to capture a fixed image using a Camera Obscrua, Niépce is credited as being the first to create a process that captured and retained its image. All other types of image capturing would eventually fade away to nothingness.